A small ashram was started in the mountains in 2006, and our first building on the property was a used double-wide trailer. A few people moved in and began to live at the ashram full time. These people were the pioneers.

After we had been there a few months, stories began to circulate among the full time residents about paranormal occurrences. Several people reported being awakened in the middle of the night to hear someone whistling outside the trailer. The whistling sound moved around the trailer several times. One guy jumped up and ran outside quickly to see if he could catch someone. There was no one there, but he could hear the sound moving off into the deep forest.

Another time, a husband and wife who lived there full time were alone in the trailer, and decided to go into town for supplies. They went out to their car, but the woman forgot something and ran back to the trailer. When she approached the door, she could hear someone playing the guitar. She was surprised, because she thought they were alone on the property. When she opened the door, the guitar playing stopped, but she could hear the strings still resonating. She called to see if anyone was inside, but there was no answer.

One night, one of the women heard someone crying outside and opened the door to find another full time resident sobbing and disoriented. It was one of the biggest toughest guys who normally worked all day with a chainsaw clearing trails. He was shaking, crying, and stumbling around in the grass.

“What’s wrong?” asked the woman.

“There’s something out here,” said the man stammering. “There’s something out here.”

One night when I was sleeping on the floor in the trailer in one of the bedrooms with three other guys. We all had our sleeping bags scattered around the room, and I had pushed mine up against the outer wall under the window. While I was sleeping, something startled me and I woke to feel the entire side of the trailer move, like someone was pushing it in about a foot, while walking the entire length of the house. It pushed in so far, that it pushed me over and I rolled into the guy next to me who was several feet away.

Another day, an odd looking man with long black hair and American Indian-style clothes drove up in an old car and parked near the trailer. Several meditators went to greet him and see what he wanted.

“I was driving by and felt compelled to pull in here,” said the man.

“Do you need something?” asked one of the meditators?

“I need to talk to you,” said the man. “I am a shaman and I have a feeling about this place that I need to share with you.”

“What kind of feeling?”

“There are spirits everyone on this property,” said the shaman. “I thought you should know about it. They’ve been here a long time. You know the Trail of Tears from the 1800’s runs nearby. The Indians were marched out of their lands by the army to Oklahoma and many of them didn’t make it. Women and children, the elderly, they marched them all, and they had to sleep along the trail. Many of them died on this land.”

“How do you know all this?” someone asked.

“I saw it suddenly while I was driving past,” said the shaman. “You need to do some rituals to purify the place if you want to stay here. You need to burn some sage and give them a boundary, so they won’t interfere with your work here.”

The shaman then left and everyone talked about his appearance for the rest of the day. Someone asked if we should do the rituals the shaman suggested, but they were quickly reminded that the mystic would be there soon and he would be able to handle any problems like this.

The mystic made his first visit to the land a few months later, and a small group of us met with him in the trailer to talk about how things were going at the young ashram. With all of the recent psychic events that had occurred, someone asked him if the mystic felt anything strange about the property. We told him about the shaman and the story he told us about the Trail of Tears.

The mystic looked around for a few moments and then answered. “There are things here,” he said mysteriously. “Some very bad things happened around here. This land has seen too much violence. And, there are energies that still linger here, but we will recycle them and use the energy for ourselves. Like your kitchen garden outside, you need fertilizer to make it grow. We will use their leftover energy as fertilizer.”

The mystic had first come to the United States eight years earlier at the invitation of some meditators who had encountered him first in India. They wanted him to come and share some of yoga and meditations with their friends back home, so he agreed to a short visit. Since it was his first time in this country, he took a little time to do some sightseeing and went for a hike alone in the mountains not far from where we now in the trailer. While he was walking along in the forest, he came across a being that seemed to be frozen in time. It was an American Indian who had been standing in the same place for over 300 years.

“He was so filled with shame and dishonor that he was completely frozen,” explained the mystic. “Something had happened to him when he died and he couldn’t face the realization. So, he just stayed that way, frozen. He refused to move on or do anything. I wanted to help him, so I dissolved him right then.”

At our gathering that afternoon in the trailer, someone asked a follow-up question regarding the spirits that still inhabited the land.

“Where do these spirits come from?” asked the meditator. “Does this happen to everyone?”

“They have shed their physical forms, but the karmic body is still intact,” explained the mystic. “They still have individual likes and dislikes, desires, and compulsions.”

The mystic explained that we have a physical body and an energy body. If the physical body is killed suddenly, the energy body may still be vibrant. It will try to reconstruct a physical form, much like it does if your physical form is just wounded. In the case where the physical form is completely dead, the energy body’s effort to reconstruct, keeps hold of the karmic structure and won’t let go. You then have a disembodied being or ghost as they are commonly known.

“Even if the being wants to dissolve and move on, it has trouble,” explained the mystic, “because even this desire adds more karma and the being becomes completely entangled.”

The mystic told us that he had the ghost of a woman hanging around his house in India. She was attached to her femininity, so she had exaggerated feminine qualities, and worn beautiful dresses and lots of jewelry. No one would be this done up in real life, but her karmic attachments were exaggerating these qualities. She would walk through his house a night, and he could hear the sound of her jewelry. Most of the time, she sat on his roof with a sad expression on her face. Eventually, he persuaded her to follow him into a shrine and bow down at the altar. When she did, he dissolved her karma and she disappeared.

“How do you dissolve them?” asked one of the meditators in the trailer.

“Karma is stored in the mind, physical body, sensations, and energy,” said the mystic. “Once you have lost the physical, there are no more sensations. The mind is still there, but it no longer works as a logical mind. It drifts around like a dream. That leaves just the energy body left holding the karma.”

The mystic went on to explain that karma is held in the energy body by certain locks or pins more commonly known as chakras.

“There are more of these locations than just the seven chakras,” he explained. “All I have to do is pull these plugs and the karmic body dissolves.”

The mystic told us that many times he is asked to go see elderly people who are sick and dying in order to help them move on.

“If I go, I can fix their karmic structure so that they will be gone within a week,” he said. “Many times, people just send me a picture of their sick relative. If I look at the picture, then that person will be able to move on within a week.”

“What methods do you use to dissolve karma?” asked the same meditator.

“You don’t need to know the method,” said the mystic with a smile. “It would be irresponsible of me to share this information.”

The mystic told us that there were people who used this knowledge for evil. They are called Tantrics. They can gain control over disembodied beings and use them to scare or even kill other people. The disembodied beings can be directed by a Tantric to possess the body of a living person in order to incapacitate the person or to get the person to commit a crime such as murder.

The thought of this sent shivers up my back and neck. I had always dismissed the idea of ghosts and demonic possession, but the mystic was telling us that it happens frequently. It also explained some of the paranormal activities that were occurring on the land and around the trailer. There were things lurking around us there in the mountains. Luckily, most of us couldn’t sense them.